There seems to be a lot of negative press for bluehost... are they really that bad? Or was it a short period they went though? The bigger a service is, the more people there are so the higher the odds are of someone having a bad experience... have they really gone downhill?
I signup bluehost early this month, i am very satisfied with bluehost hosting. Bluehost established since 1996, and hosted more than 250,000 sites.
I had no problem of any until now, FTP access is reliable and fast, website is loaded fast, and no downtime detected yet.I also find their bluehostforum.com very useful in getting helps.
Bluehost $6.95 plan allow me to host up to 6 domains My domain i mentioning here is:
Time to time i perform speed test using hostpulse.com online test, the result can be view at here:
anyone had experienced with bluehost are welcome to post here
So when you got a website for a service and it says "$6 per month for 3 years" would you take that as they charge you monthly, $6?
Well Bluehost doesn't. They charged me $250 and I didn't realize what they were doing until the charge went through.
I called within 24 hours and spoke to billing. I cancelled the entire service. She said it was only a "hold" on my account and she would make the hold credit me back and it would be done within a few hours and that I would receive an email from her confirming. Well, I got another confirmation email NOT a we are cancelling the service email.
Then, one $250 charge dropped off... AND TWO MORE APPEARED.
In one of the confirmation emails they sent there was an email address for the help desk. So I emailed this to them. I am not speaking to them on the phone. I want it in writing this time. Two seconds after I sent the email I got an auto response telling me they don't read the email and I must formally put in a ticket.
I didn't think I would be able to since my account was supposed to be cancelled. Well, it did let me log in. She didn't cancel it and if she did she went and put it back in again twice.
Of the many sites I have, I have one hosted at Bluehost. In the beginning I was very sattisfied and happy. Lately due to workload and stuff, I changed the sites scripts into Drupal.
This seems in retrospect a bad choice because I get CPU exceeds suddenly. Now because I was new to Drupal I thought it was mistake. But with caching enabled agressivly, a minimum of mods enabled and FastCGI on there are still reports of CPU exceeds. This is something which ticks me of. Google Analytics says (I have hosting stats disabled) I get about 300 unique visitors per day.
So the real question is, whats suxors the most. Drupal or Bluehost? Bluehost says Drupal is a falty script made up of bad coding...
I find 300 visitors per day a little low to move to a VPS host. So my question is, is there another host where I can host my site(s) that has equal settings as Bluehost?
They are scammer, we sign up with them and they ask us to submit credit card detail which we do.
Guess what , they use our credit card to purchase server for their own use, we contact them and they ask us to charge back if we wish, I think as they are now no longer need for the server
They are a scammer Scammer and poor DC will suffer a lost becasue I will chargeback all the charges for the server
May I Know is there any way to report this company (I am not in US) cause they must be punish for this issue
I want to run couple of sites which are ajax and GWT based. I can spend upto 120 bucks for at least 6 months great service.
So far I have googled, I think I may have to choose between mediatemple or bluehost(unless someone comes out with real and better offer).
I was wondering why I will choose MediaTeple with double the price than other one. What are the advantages do they provide over others?Do they provide exactly what they say? Like 1TB bandwidth, GPU unit usage , 100GB space, fast MySQL ?
I found a lot of people moving from bluehost to mediatemple and vice varsa talking about their issues. But what is the recent performance status of those 2 hosting sites?
My (must to have) requirements are - 1. Is not too much bandwidth sensitive (expected grow in 3 months to consume upto 1TB/month ) 2. Is not too much sensitive on resource usage (must not block users) 3. Is fast in response. (Ajax site) 4. Has fast MySQL server.
Please suggest me best possible web hosting suitable for my requirements.
IMO.... Stay far away from Bluehost... not worth it.
Actually, I took notice of all the discussion over on phpBB about bluehost. They quickly close and locked such discussions. It's obviously due to there income from Bluehosts advertising through them. Anyhow...it's how I ended up here since this is where they tell us to come. lol
Here is my letter I sent to their admin since I know I can't post it on their site....
Hello,
I couldn't happen but notice the extensive advertising of Bluehost on your site. I also took notice of the quick closing of discussions pertaining to hosting companies, especially of Bluehost. It's obvious that they help support phpBB financially, but please take into consideration the companies you promote to your users. This could in return have a negative effect on here.
With my personal experience with this company, I have nothing good to say about them. I am the executive director of an ad agency that had several clients hosting their sites with them. Due to awful experiences over and over again, we now fully and highly recommend that no one hosts with them. Actually, we are located in the same town as this company and it's well known throughout the community to stay away from them.
An example of what we dealt with..... One of our largest billion dollar clients had several accounts hosted with them. One lovely evening, we took notice to an awful notification of suspension on this clients site. According to them, the site was shut down due to an automatic response that reacted to a bad piece of script. As such, without warning, it shut the entire site down. With immediate phone calls, no one was willing to help us out nor explain the situation. No one cared and there was no more information beyond a bad piece of script. It took almost 48 hours to get all of our files and data copied over so we could host it on another server. 48 hours with a huge account is like eternity and a loss of significant income and reputation. There was never an explanation nor any attempt to help. Once we moved the site over, we never experienced any issues. Couple weeks later, two more sites that this client hosted through them had the same exact issue. Not only did they pull ALL of their sites off their servers, but so did the rest of our clients due to our recommendation.
No money is worth supporting and aligning oneself with a company of such a negative reputation and statistics that prove it.
I truly hope you take this into consideration.
(BTW...I forgot to mention the awful notice they put up on the site. In huge letters it says "This site has been suspended" Then it goes into about having the owner of the site contact them. Sorry...but it's a very negative message that was display. They could've at least posted something along the lines of... Sorry for the inconvenience, xxxxxx is currently unavailable due to technical server issues" Then they coulda called us to inform us of this issue Better yet..they could've warned us about the message and situation and given us a chance to do something about it beforehand.... but absolutely no customer service what-so-ever. Very poor business practices.)
I conducted a couple of questions for each host and this is what was said, it seems HG is abit shy on giving out details, where bluehost didn't mind telling:
Please wait for a HostGator operator to respond.
Welcome to HostGator Live Chat! You are now chatting with 'Jefferson S.'
Jefferson S.: Welcome to HostGator, how may I assist you?
Stuart: evening Jefferson
Stuart: could you tell me how many shared accounts use the same ip address
Jefferson S.: no, i don't have that information
Stuart: couldn't you find out?
Jefferson S.: no, I can not see how many accounts are on a server and we do not give that information out
Stuart: ok its just a performance related question i thought you could answer and to many accounts on the same ip isn't good really as you must know... for your information Bluehost have 500accounts per server and a couple of hundred that use the same ip.
Jefferson S.: we fill our servers 80% capacity
Stuart: ok thank you for your help Jefferson
Jefferson S.: You're welcome!
AND HERE'S MY QUESTIONS WITH BLUEHOST
Ann A. [5:48:14 PM]: Thank you for contacting the Sales Team. Please give me a moment while I review your question.
stuart [5:48:14 PM]: could you tell me if you have any uptime stats and do you own your servers or lease?
Ann A. [5:48:52 PM]: Hi! We average 99.9% network uptime. You can google bluehost uptime, there's several sites that monitor uptime for different hosts. We manage our own servers, which are located in Orem, Utah, USA
stuart [5:49:47 PM]: how would you say you are as a company compared to hostgator?
stuart [5:50:59 PM]: thinking of an answer lol
Ann A. [5:53:23 PM]: Our hosting packages are pretty similar. The way we run our scripts is more secure. Bluehost's scripts run using user:user based permissions, which means your scripts and files are as secure as Linux itself. HostGator runs scripts as nobody:nobody, making the individual script security not as secure.
Ann A. [5:53:46 PM]: We also offer free backup restores, which I think hostgator charges for.
Ann A. [5:54:08 PM]: They also use cpanel, which is what we use. I'm not certain what their cpu and process limits are,
stuart [5:54:31 PM]: excellent answer thats what I call good customer service! even though you had to ask a collegue lol [5:54:53 PM]: how many people share the same ip?
Ann A. [5:55:43 PM]: On average we have 500 accounts per server. Each server has multiple ips, let me see if I can find a more exact number. one moment please.
stuart [5:55:55 PM]: thank you
Ann A. [6:01:35 PM]: Thank you for waiting. There's probably a couple hundred that share the same ip address.
stuart [6:03:16 PM]: thank you Ann for answering the questions ohnestly..hostgator wouldn't tell me theirs they just said they fill their servers 80%
Based on my experience with their twin brand, Hostmonster, I would say that they should be just fine for a hobby site/playing around. I don't know about their support, as I didn't use it.
some largeish download file links to test my download speed with. I need some from Bluehost and Dreamhost. If you have a link for another host on the west coast feel free to post it.
I can only state my own experiences with Bluehost. As a longtime web designer I have been sending my clients to Bluehost for years. In fact I started a web service at that will do free setup and install of Wordpress if you open a account with Bluehost. I like to keep all my clients in one place. I have had no problems with Bluehost over the past five years. If a client's website starts to get many hits and more traffic than a standard shared hosting account can handle I then move them over to a real VPS. But if your just starting out Bluehost and a service like mine is a good choice.
just want to share some negative experience with bluehost, thoughts on overselling, and to ask for an advice on what hosting to move to ... Bluehost.
Here's what is going on on the server box that I have an account on. I can see this via the ssh account that bluehost gave me.
The box is 8 CPUs, with average load about 15-25%, though sometimes it goes up to 70. It's got about 700G of space for the users. There are 26 registered users (including myself), but these are only those who have asked for ssh access; since I guess not everybody asks, there just as well may be another 100 or so users.
Now, bluehost offers 1.5TB (or is it 15TB?) storage. Since we've got 0.7TB for at least 26 of us, the conclusion is obvious: nobody can get the promised amount.
Now this is where the problem begins. Apparently one of the users of the box has attempted to make good of the 1.5TB promise; as a result the box ran out of space.
The consequences you can imagine.
The consequences for all of the users of the box - not only for the one who made it run out of space. I was actually using only a couple of gigs, and when the box went full my accounts started loosing emails, my cpanel was shut down and so on.
To add up to the trouble, bluehost didn't react until I (and perhaps others) complained. And when the support did pay attention to the problem, it was only to add some 20-30G (may be they just cleaned up something, I can't say).
Overselling.
Now it becomes clear to me that overselling is a problem not only for those who try to actually use the promised amount of space and bandwidth, but to everybody. Moreover, if a single user tries to use all his space it already leads to troubles.
I was imagining before that these providers have huge servers, so that if one actually uses his 1.5TB others won't notice - it's only if many try to do this there's a problem. How very naive. Indeed it's hard to imagine a single server box on which somebody using 1.5TB could pass unnoticed. As it happens with bluehost, a server can't accommodate even one such user.
Finally, I'm in need of recommendations.
I'm looking for a hosting to move to. In fact I only have a couple of static websites with about 20 emails on them. However, it appears to be not such an easy task to find a reasonable host. The point is that I like to have at least 2-3G of space- so that I wouldn't need to delete any emails and worry about the space in general. What is on offer, however, is either 200M for smth like 7$/month, or these unlimited TB from oversellers. Somehow there seem to be nothing in between. Thus what I need is perhaps a moderate overseller. One who can't allow everybody to use all their space at the same time, but can tolerate reasonably expectable increases of usage.
In short: is there a hosting provider that can give me: 3G space, 2 domains allowed to host, ~3G bandwidth a month, 30 or so emails. And all this for 5-8$?
I did some quick live chat sessions with them just to see how far this "unlimited" really goes. Here's what I got:
-Maximum of 8 simultaneous IMAP connections -Maximum of 40 simultaneous PHP connections -Maximum of 60 simultaneous MySQL connections -Maximum of 400 simultaneous HTTP connections -Maximum of 8 simultaneous FTP connections
I just found that kind of funny and thought I'd share it with y'all.
It basically just sums up what y'all have been saying all along:
If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
I noticed that HostGator, HostMonster, and BlueHost are very popular, but I would really like to know which is better overall. I plan on running vBulletin, and when it gets more traffic I will upgrade to a VPS.
Based on your experiences, which one should I go with?
New to the board, although I've looked through it for awhile. This is my first post. My company currently hosts internally and plans to move to external hosting. What's your take on Bluehost vs. Network Solutions for shared hosting?
Was actually wondering what you guys recommend as far HostGator Reselling opportunity vs Bluehost re-selling opportunity. I came prepared for this questions, so here are my goals:
Goals:
Long Term - I've biz established already and would like to add hosting as unlimited bonuses and even start a hosting business slowly as my own forums start to pick intensity
The 24-month option of Bluehost seems irresistable with unlimited bandwidth and 1tb of space (as their chat), kind of skeptical as it isn't in writing, but it seems they have a better offter at first then Hostgator, but they don't provide a billing system like: whmautopilot. PL nameservers are also $2/month with Bluehost, but Hostgator reseller options has them included.
I'm thinking of finding a webhost in US. I knew these hosting company - Bluehost, Dreamhost, Hostgator are the famous one. They are offering quite similar package as well.
No sure which to choose.
Usage: just normal wordpress blog with a lot of photos. Might want to have my own photo gallery in the hosting server as well. Must have Fantastico Deluxe and must be in cpanel. lol.. I'm used to cpanel.